2010: The Year We Make Contact Monologues

A joint USA-Soviet expedition is sent to Jupiter to learn exactly what happened to the "Discovery" and its H.A.L. 9000 computer.

My dear Christopher, this is the last time I'll be able to speak to you for a long while. I'm trying to put into words what has happened. Maybe that's for historians to do sometime later. They will record that the next day, the President of the United States looked out of the White House window and the Premier of the Soviet Union looked out of the Kremlin window, and saw the new distant sun in the sky. They read the message, and perhaps they learned something because they finally recalled their ships and their planes. I am going to sleep now. I will dream of you and your mother. I will sleep knowing that you are both safe, that the fear is over. We have seen the process of life take place. Maybe this is the way it happened on Earth millions of years ago. Maybe it's something completely different. I still don't know really what the monolith is. I think it's many things. An embassy for an intelligence beyond ours. A shape of some kind for something that has no shape. Your children will be born in a world of two suns. They will never know a sky without them. You can tell them that you remember when there was a pitch black sky with no bright star, and people feared the night. You can tell them when we were alone, when we couldn't point to the light and say to ourselves - 'There is life out there.' Someday, the children of the new sun will meet the children of the old. I think they will be our friends. You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that we were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a warning from the landlord.

I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that's the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.

No, no, no. This is different. They're gonna put me asleep in orbit... and you'd have to sleep on the way up, and sleep on the way down, otherwise... you'd go cuckoo... and there wouldn't be enough food aboard the flight for everybody.

I don't know if HAL is homicidal, suicidal, neurotic, psychotic, or just plain broken.

Someday, the children of the new sun will meet the children of the old. I think they will be our friends.

Dear Caroline: I miss you terribly. The time has come to put ourselves in an orbit around Io, which is where Discovery is. We don't have enough fuel to slow ourselves down, so we are about to use a technique called aerobraking. The theory is, we will enter the outer layer of Jupiter's atmosphere using what is called a "ballute" for a shield. The atmosphere will slow us down, and Jupiter's gravity will grab hold of us and slingshot us around behind the dark side. If all goes well, we'll wind up in a gentle orbit around Io. It's dynamite on paper. Of course the people who came up with the numbers on the paper aren't here. Since no one has ever done this before, everyone up here is as scared as I am. The difference is, they're busy. I have nothing to do but wait for it to happen. I hope this is all worth it.

Yours. In going through HAL's memory banks, I discovered his original orders. You wrote those orders. Discovery's mission to Jupiter was already in the advanced planning stages when the first small Monolith was found on the Moon, and sent its signal towards Jupiter. By direct presidential order, the existence of that Monolith was kept secret.

So, as the function of the command crew - Bowman and Poole - was to get Discovery to its destination, it was decided that they should not be informed. The investigative team was trained separately, and placed in hibernation before the voyage began. Since HAL was capable of operating Discovery without human assistance, it was decided that he should be programmed to complete the mission autonomously in the event the crew was incapacitated or killed. He was given full knowledge of the true objective… and instructed not to reveal anything to Bowman or Poole. He was instructed to lie.

Directive is NSC 342/23, top secret, January 30, 2001.

I don't care who it is. The situation was in conflict with the basic purpose of HAL's design: The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. He became trapped. The technical term is an H. Moebius loop, which can happen in advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs.

HAL was told to lie… by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how, so he couldn't function. He became paranoid.

Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL… just as I often do.

Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect.

This is initial voice-logic reconstruction test number one. Diagnostics on voice recognition and speech synthesis centers has been completed. At this level all functions appear normal.

Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow.

HAL was told to lie - by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how.

We enjoy working with you HAL and we will continue to do so - even if we are separated by a great distance.

Diagnosis is only the first step. The process is incomplete unless it leads to a cure. Do you agree?